Before leaving office this summer, former defense acquisition chief Kenneth Krieg approved the launch of a new career track at the Pentagon for those who want to specialize in international export controls.
The move is one of many efforts the Pentagon is pursuing to better manage the export license requests from foreign countries that want to buy U.S. weapons, said Al Volkman, director of international cooperation at the office of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. These requests now take weeks or months to be processed by the Defense and the State Departments, Volkman said. The Pentagon approval process is laborious. Four committees make export control decisions and they have trouble sharing information, he noted. Another challenge is educating program managers about the export control process, Volkman said, “because they didn’t learn it at the Defense Acquisition University.”